From triple-play to double-play when the OSS/BSS transformation is just a buzz word

Keith Willetts' last blog published also by Telecommunications Online Magazine is a realistic and hopefully motivating analysis of why Service Providers should continue with their operational transformation projects based on IT and creatively think forward on new generation of services.

I'm not just the broken trumpet here, I have facts in hand if you wanted to hear my story.

I have recently tried to install triple-play service in a new condo. It took 3 weeks, 4 technicians trips to my place and almost 10 calls to the call center. And all that I got was double-play for a higher price than the triple-play package I initially ordered.

All the answers as to why this excruciating experience that raises my blood pressure each time when I see the company's add for triple-play on TV, all the answers sit in the inefficiency and obsolesce of the operational processes, the same since the initial value proposition of the company, the cable TV.

One call I had with the Service Provider was specifically about this inefficiency in hope that somebody will hear me. This is when I found out out for example that the culprit is "the system"!
"The system" can not:
-track work orders unless there is one truck with one technician sent per apartment even though the intervention is on the same type and must happen at the same place!
- activate a new phone number in less than 4 days
- indicate that the signal is too low and the cable infrastructure is too old to install high speed Internet or triple play in some areas

Changing "the system" is what this OSS/BSS transformation is about. Redesigning obsolete workflows into agile business processes, rationalizing the myriad of management tools which confuse and separate organizations, putting location based services enabled PDAs in technicians hands and updating their skills to match those of datacenter technicians who beside driving a truck know how to draw cables, measure signals, plug them into boxes, have heard about IP and can even type a few encrypted commands to properly test the status of a computer or a program.

And if the skills part does not work, just surface all these service activation operations to a portal, the new generation of subscribers will know what to do with it.

Email incommunicado

Have you noticed how difficult and slow is communication via email these days?

Have spammers killed this dear channel or are we just bad receivers who try to improve our email processing efficiency with tools that are not wired for our communicative behaviors?

We want to be kept in the loop and be communicative by subscribing to lists and CC-ing entire organizations but then we kill the direct channel, the simple email addressed to us by somebody whom we know either because he/she uses a different email address or because the email has been placed in an unimportant folder by the inflexible rules where we can not code “but put it into my inbox if I am the only recipient and I know this person”.

Emailing drops from the list of communications means because the decoding at the receiving end is nolonger working on the information in the body but has been transformed in the business assistant scrutinizing the envelopes coming in for her boss based on her guess and unaware of marketing tricks. Whether I do not have the right email address, the catchy subject or the shortness in expression, there is a high chance my email will not be read and my message will not reach its destination.

Mail, telegram, email, instant messaging, phone, telepresence and transcendence … by abandoning email I need to move now up on the communication scale into options that are more and more intrusive and which may obsolete textual and graphical communication when these are the best means of expressing our thoughts in an objective, persistent, linguistically rich, and hard to repudiate way.

Is there value in saving the email channel or is it already dead business?